XXIX A GNAWING IN THE DARK

On our return to the veranda, Camille and I, we found on its front the house's entire company except only the children of the family. Mrs. Sessions, Estelle and Cécile formed one group, Squire Sessions and Charlotte Oliver made a pair, and Ferry and Miss Harper another. Our posies created a lively demonstration; Camille yielded them to Estelle, and Estelle took them into the house to arrange them in water. Gholson went with her; it was painful to see her zest for his society.

Miss Harper "knocked me down," as we boys used to say, to Charlotte Oliver; "Charlotte, my dear, you already know Mr. Smith, I believe?"

I had expected to see again, and to feel, as well, the starry charms of Coralie Rothvelt; but what I confronted was far different. The charms were here, unquenched by this stare of daylight, but from them shone a lustre of womanliness wholly new. It seemed to grow on even when a tricksy gleam shot through it as she replied, "Yes, our acquaintance dates from Gallatin."

With a spasm of eagerness I said it did: "Our acquai'--hh--Gallatin--hh--" But my soul cried like a culprit, "No, no, it begins only now!" and my whole being stood under arrest before the accusing truth that from Gallatin till now my acquaintance had been solely with that false phase of her which I knew as Coralie Rothvelt. At the same her kind eyes sweetly granted me a stripling's acquittal--oh! why did it have to be a stripling's?

Wonderful eyes she had; deep blue, as I have said, in color; black, in spirit; never so wonderful as when having sparkled black they quieted to blue again. Always then there came the slightest of contractions at the outer corners of the delicate lids, that gave a fourfold expression of thought, passion, tenderness and intrepidity. I never saw that silent meaning in but one other pair of eyes; wherever it turned it said--at the same time saying many other things but saying this always plainest--"I see both out and in; I know myself--and thee." Never but in one other pair of eyes? no; and whose were those? Ned Ferry's.

"Don't you love to see Charlotte and him look at each other in that steady way when they're talking together?" Camille asked me later. But rather coldly I inquired why I should; I felt acutely enough without admitting it to Camille, that Charlotte and Ferry were meeting on ground far above me; and when Gholson, in his turn, called to my notice, in Charlotte's case, this unique gaze, and contrasted it with her beautiful yet strangely childish mouth, I asked a second time why she was here, anyhow.

"She's here," murmured Gholson, "because she has to live! To live she must have means, Smith, and to have means she must either get them herself or she must--" and again he poised his hand horizontally across his mouth and whispered--"live with her hus'--"

I jerked my head away--"Yes, yes." Scott Gholson was the only one of us who could give that wretch that title. "Gholson," I said, for I kept him plied with questions to prevent his questioning me, "how did that man ever get her?"

The rest of the company were going into the house; he glanced furtively after them and grabbed my arm; you would have thought he was about to lay bare the whole tragedy in five words; "Smith,--nobody knows!"

"Do you believe she has told Ned Ferry anything?"

"Never! About herself? no, sir!" He bent and whispered: "She despises him; she keeps in with him, but it's to get the news, that's all; that's positively all." On our way to the stable to saddle up--for we were all going to church--he told me what he knew of her story. I had heard it all and more, but I listened with unfeigned interest, for he recited it with flashes of heat and rancor that betrayed a cruel infatuation eating into his very bone and brain, the guilt of which was only intensified by the sour legality of his moral sense.

The church we went to was in Franklin, but the preacher was a man of note, a Vicksburg refugee. On the way back Gholson and I rode for a time near enough to Squire Sessions and Ned Ferry to know the sermon was being discussed by them, and something they said gave my companion occasion to murmur to me in a tone of eager censure that Ned Ferry's morals were better than his religion.

I said I wished mine were.

"Ah, Smith, be not deceived! Whenever you see a man bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit while he neglects the regularly appointed means of grace, you know there's something wrong, don't you? He went to church this morning--of course; but how often does he go? What's wrong with our dear friend--I don't like to say it, for I admire him so; I don't like to say it, and I never have said it, but, Smith,--Ned Ferry's a romanticist. We are relig'--what?"

"O--oh, nothing!"

At one point our way sloped down to a ramshackle wooden bridge that spanned a narrow bit of running water at the edge of a wood. Beyond it the road led out between two fields whose high worm-fences made it a broad lane. The farther limit of this sea of sunlight was the grove that hid the Sessions house on the left; on the right it was the woods-pasture in which lay concealed a lily-pond. As Gholson and I crossed the bridge we came upon a most enlivening view of our own procession out in the noonday blaze before us; the Sessions buggy; then Charlotte' little wagon; next the Sessions family carriage full of youngsters; and lastly, on their horses, Squire Sessions--tall, fleshy, clean-shaven, silver-haired--and Ned Ferry. Mrs. Sessions and Miss Harper, in the buggy, were just going by a big white gate in the right-hand fence, through which a private way led eastward to the lily-pond. A happy sight they were, the children in the rear vehicle waving handkerchiefs back at us, and nothing in the scene made the faintest confession that my pet song, which I was again humming, was pat to the hour:
  "To the lairds o' Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
   Ere the sun shall go down there are heads to be broke."

"Gholson, if it isn't Ned Ferry's religion that's worrying you just now about him, what is it?"

My companion looked at me as if what he must say was too large for his throat. He made a gesture of lament toward Ferry and broke out, "O--oh Smith,"--nearly all Gholson's oh's were groans--"why is he here? The scout is 'the eyes of the army'! a man whose perpetual vigilance at the very foremost front--"

"Why, what do you mean? You know we're here to rejoin the company as it comes down from union Church to camp here to-night. That's what we're here for."

"Yes,--yes,--but, oh, don't you see, Smith? For you, yourself, that's all right; you've got to stay with him, and I'm glad you have. But he--oh why did he not go on hours ago, to meet them?"

"Why should he? Isn't it good to leave one's lieutenant sometimes in command; isn't it bad not to?"

Gholson's eyes turned green. "Does Ned Ferry give that as his reason?"

"I haven't asked his reason; I've asked you a question."

"Well, I'll answer it. Do you think Jewett has run back into his own lines?"

"Of course I do, and Ned Ferry does; don't you?"

"No! Smith, there ain't a braver man in Grant's army than that one right now a-straddle of your horse. Why, just the way he got your horse night before--"

"Oh, hang him and the horse! you've told me that three times; what of it?"

"Smith, he's out here to make a new record for himself, at whatever cost!"

"And do you imagine Ned Ferry hasn't thought of that?"

"Ah-h, there are times when a man hasn't got his thinking powers; you ought to know that, Smith,--"

"Mr. Gholson, what do you mean by that?"

"Oh! I certainly didn't mean anything against you, Smith. Why is your manner so strange to me to-day? Oh, Smith, if you knew what--if I could speak to you in sacred confidence--I--I wouldn't injure Ned Ferry in your eyes, nor in anybody's; I only tell you what I do tell so you may help me to help him. But he's staying here, Smith, and keeping you here, to be near one whose name--without her a-dreaming of it--is already coupled with--why,--why, what made you start that a-way again, Smith?"

"Nothing; I didn't start. 'Coupled with somebody's name,' you say. With whose? Go on."

"With his, Smith, and most injuriously. He's here to tempt her to forget she's not--" He faltered.

"Free?" said I, and he nodded with tragic solemnity.

"You know who I mean, of course?"

"Certainly; you mean Mrs. Sessions."

He shook his head bitterly. "Oh, well, then, of course I know. How am I to help you to help him; help him to do what?"

"O--oh! to tear himself away from her, Smith. I want you to appeal to him. He's taken a great shine to you. You can appeal to his feeling for romance--poetry--whatever he calls his hell-fired--I mean his unfortunate impiety. You know how, and I don't. And there you reach the foundations of his character, as far as it's got any; there's his conscience if it's anywhere!"

I find myself giving but a faint impression of the spirit in which Gholson spoke; it went away beyond a mere backbiting mood and became a temper so vindictive and so venomously purposeful that I was startled; his condition seemed so fearfully like that of the old paralytic when he whined "That's not our way."

"Smith," my companion went on, "we ought to protect Ned Ferry from himself!" The words came through his clenched teeth. "And even more we ought to protect her. Who's to do it if we don't? Smith, I believe Providence has been a-preparing you to do this, all through these last three nights and days!"

He looked at me for an answer until I became frightened. Was my late folly known to this crawling maligner after all? A sweet-scented preparation I've had, thought I, but aloud I said only, "If Ned Ferry clears out, I suppose we must clear out, too."

"Why, eh,--I--I don't know that my movements need have anything to do with his. Yours, of course,--"

"Yes," I interrupted, beginning to boil.

"I know," he said, "that comes hard; you'll have to tear yourself away--"

He stared at me and hushed. A panic was surging through me; must I be brought to book by such as he? "Mr. Gholson," I cried, all scorn without, all terror within; "Mr. Gholson, I--Mr. Gholson, sir!--" and set my jaws and heaved for breath.

"Why, Smith,--" He extended a soothing hand.

"No explanation, sir, if you please! I can get away from here without tearing myself, which is more than you can boast. Any fool can see why you are here. Stop, I take that back, sir! I don't play tit-for-tat with my tongue."

Gholson turned red on the brow and ashen about the lips. "I don't call that tit-for-tat, Mr. Smith. I remind you of an innocent attachment for a young girl; you accuse me of harboring a guilty passion for--" All at once he ceased with open lips, and then said as he drew a long breath of relief, "Smith, I beg your pardon! We've each misunderstood the other; I see, now, who you meant; you meant Miss Estelle Harper!"

"Whom else could I mean?" Disdain was in my voice, but he ought to have seen the falsehood in my eye, for I could feel it there.

"Of course!" he said; "of course! But, Smith, my mind was so full--just for the moment, you know,--of her we were speaking of in connection with Ned Ferry--Do you know? she's so unprotected and tagged after and talked about that it seems to me sometimes, in this nervous condition of mine, that if I could catch the entire gang of her pursuers in one hole I'd--I'd end 'em like so many rats. That sort of feeling is mere impulse, of course," he went on, "and only shows how near I am to that nervous breakdown. Yes, the Harper ladies are mighty lovely and hard enough to leave, but that's all I meant to you, and I'm sorry I touched your feelings. I'm tchagrined. Anyhow, all this is between us, you know. I wouldn't ever have confessed such feelings as I did just now except to a friend who knows as well as you do that if I ever should do a man a mortal injury I wouldn't do it in a spirit of resentment. You know that, don't you? No, that's not my way--Why, Smith, what gives you those starts? That's the third time you've done that this morning."

I said that entering the cool shade of the Sessions grove after the blazing heat of that long lane gave any one the right to a little shudder, and as we turned toward the house Gholson murmured "If you say you'll speak to Ned as I've asked you, I'll sort o' toll Squire Sessions off with me so's to give you the chance. It's for his own sake, you know, and you're the only one can do it."